Books November 2018

All or nothing

A review of Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

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Micah Goodman is a well-known public intellectual in Israel, and his book Catch-67 is a contribution to the obsessive Israeli debate about the future of the West Bank. The underlying question is the place in history of Zionism, the ideology that led to the creation of the Jewish state and has sustained it ever since. No Zionism, no Israel. Here was a national liberation movement like any other, except that Jews had lost their national territory in the distant past and therefore were bound to have to fight longer and harder than other nationalists to recover it. Today Kurds, Kosovars, and even Ukrainians are similarly unable to fix their national identity to a homeland with agreed-upon borders. If Israel hands all or most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, Zionism will have reached its limit and be in retreat. Other Israelis take the view that after the First World War the British cut up...